In many datacenters, a large amount of computing equipment is present including servers, storages devices, switches or other load balancers and so forth. To maintain an accurate inventory system, a great deal of time and expense is involved in identifying each of the pieces of equipment with a unique identifier, such as a readable barcode and storing information regarding each such piece of equipment in an inventory database. Often times a large amount of manual effort is required to populate this database and to effect updates, e.g., when additional equipment is installed into the datacenter or old equipment is removed.
Another issue in datacenters is remote monitoring of the equipment to identify when a particular piece of equipment is suffering from a fault or other abnormal condition. While remote monitoring systems are available, typically they are very complex and require a great deal of interoperable parts to enable their proper operation.